There is no firefox 3.5 in the repositories of Mint. So I have downloaded the tar.gz from mozilla's site. How do I get it to replace Firefox 3.0?

Are you sure it is not there? You need to enable extra repositories. You can even add launchpad repos.

firefox-3.5 is in the Gloria repo's
but you need to be running Gloria, to find it.
(not Felicia )

More info here: http://www.linuxmint.com/blog/?p=958

It basically comes down to the following

Note that for some unknown reason (to me anyway) Firefox is called the "Shiretoko" browser

Firefox 3.5.x is not available in distributions based on Ubuntu 9.04. You can get a version of it by adding the PPA repositories that have it, but it's not the Mozilla distribution release. This is the "Shiretoko" referred to. The reasons for this are complicated. For the most part it boils down to the 3.5 version having enough changes to constitute a milestone release (addition of HTML 5 support, new javascript rendering), which are generally not included in debian based repositories. That is, major revisions don't get included until the next major release of a distribution.

The easiest way I have found to update system-wide to the latest Firefox release in any debian based distro is to use the ubuntuzilla.py scripts:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawik...?v=uOHvZjiDANg

Install that .deb, then issue the following command:

ubuntuzilla.py -a install -p firefox

This will get you the latest version of Firefox, no matter what it is. (It can also be used for Seamonkey and Thunderbird.)

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